


The Cosmos, and Everything Beneath

by the_wordbutler



Series: Motion Practice [20]
Category: Marvel (Comics), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Holidays, Legal Drama, motion practice universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-13
Updated: 2013-12-13
Packaged: 2018-01-04 12:15:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1080906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_wordbutler/pseuds/the_wordbutler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every year, Loki returns home for Christmas and embarks on a private tradition he’d rather not share—or lose.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Cosmos, and Everything Beneath

**Author's Note:**

> This story takes place in December 2013, after an unwritten MPU story called “Fruit of the Poisonous Tree.” In that story, Loki and Sif represent clients who are codefendants in a criminal case. Loki refers to the case because it definitely does not end well for either of them. 
> 
> In the comics, Sif and Heimdall are siblings. My explanation for how they are related (and Heimdall’s first name) is in the endnotes.
> 
> All I ever want for Christmas is my fantastic betas to keep being fantastic. Luckily, they’re Jen and saranoh, and that’s pretty easy for them. Also, I think this is the first story in the history of the MPU where neither of them had any changes for me to make. Progress!

Astrid Odinson is nine months old on Christmas Eve, capable of pulling herself to her feet when near furniture, and endowed with an overwhelming penchant for trouble.

“Little one, you will not survive the season if you’re not careful,” Loki chides her for the fifth time, scooping her up as she reaches for the lowest branch of his parents’ Christmas tree. Three times the night before, she’d overbalanced herself and tumbled onto the floor, howling not in pain but at her inability to reach the tantalizing branches; even in her uncle’s grip, she stretches out greedy fingers and grunts, frustrated. 

Loki chuckles. “Yes, your grandmother put together a lovely tree, but it’s not for babies,” he tells her, and shifts her in his grip so she can watch the twinkling white lights. Outside, the yellow farmhouse is decorated almost garishly, covered in enormous colored bulbs that he’s certain can be seen from space. A plastic Santa and his eight equally-plastic reindeer cast ghostly colored shadows along the snow, half-buried as they are, and enormous light-up stars hang from the branches of the oak tree in the front yard. He’d shuddered as he’d arrived early the day before, imagining what the eye-sores would look like when plugged in.

Thor, for his part, had waved from the porch roof. “Brother!” he’d called. “Come, help me hang the wreaths!”

He’d gestured to a pile of unassuming pine branches at his side, and Loki’d scowled when he realized they were not branches but rather five large wreaths, waiting to be hung along the front of the house.

“I am burdened with many bags,” he’d lied, and beat a hasty retreat inside. 

But aside from the horrifying decorations outside, his parents’ home is much the place of candied Christmas wishes he remembers from his childhood, full of color and light that warms him from the bottom of his stomach and then radiates outward. He sways with Astrid as she watches the lights, a few chubby fingers in her mouth as she’s lulled into quiet, and he studies the ornaments his mother’s hung with care. The red, gold, and green balls are interspersed with jet planes and trains, metal birds and plastic pinecones, and for a few minutes, Loki tries to name their origins; he explains to Astrid that he bought the tiny bluebird from a school funfair as a first-grader—his first independent gift to his mother—and that the collection of planes undoubtedly belong to Thor. She tips her head toward him, watching his face, and then puts her spit-covered hand atop his lips.

He laughs. “Tired of my stories already?”

“She wants kisses,” a voice comments from the doorway, and Loki turns as Jane wanders into the living room. She’s dressed in jeans and a sweater, her feet bare against the carpeting, and Loki’s struck for a moment as he realizes how lucky his brother is. Not because Jane is beautiful—she is, of course, but beauty is like a cut flower, fading over time—but because the warmth radiates off her in waves. She smiles at him. “Watch,” she instructs, and puckers her lips.

Astrid immediately bursts to life, wriggling as her mother leans in to kiss her. She sticks her hand out and mashes it to Jane’s mouth, and when Jane kisses her palm noisily, she dissolves into screaming giggles. The kisses chase up her arm, then to her soft neck and round cheeks, and Astrid kicks in delight. The laughter only stops when the kisses do, and Astrid immediately grabs onto her mother’s clothes and refuses to let go until Loki hands her over.

“Your brother started it,” Jane explains as Astrid pushes her fingers against her mother’s mouth. Jane gently removes her hand. Loki watches her as she starts to say something else but then pauses. She purses her lips into a tight line. “Are you coming to church with us tonight?” she finally asks.

He snorts. “I think you’ll find that the Swedish chapel my parents prefer nearly bursts into flames when I walk in,” he replies. Jane tips her head at him rather humorlessly, and he sighs. Digging his hands into his pockets only reminds him that they’re full of pocket lint and a cell phone that never rings except for work. He watches the lights on the tree twinkle for a few moments before he finally answers, “No.”

“Why not?” 

“I’ve never seen much of a point in speaking to someone who isn’t there to listen,” he informs her. Her brow bunches, and he shakes his head. “You’re a scientist. Surely you don’t believe in an omnipotent being who micromanages our daily lives.”

Jane hikes Astrid further up on her hip, but in the motion, Loki detects the smallest shrug. The baby shoves her mother’s hair into her mouth, and Jane tuts for a moment as she frees the stolen strands. “I’m not sure what I believe,” she admits after a few seconds, her attention mostly focused on her daughter. “If you’d asked me five years ago, I might have agreed with you. But the more I study the universe, the harder it is for me to believe it’s all a random cosmic accident.”

“Life itself is a random accident,” he returns. He watches the tiny bluebird he once gave his mother sway on its branch. “It’s unlikely the rest of the universe is any different.”

“You don’t actually believe that,” Jane challenges.

He shakes his head. “You’d be surprised what I believe,” he replies, and leaves her and her small daughter in front of the tree.

Loki retreats to his bedroom, empty now of anything of value but still filled with the trinkets of his youth: trophies from speech and scholastic bowl tournaments in high school, models of towering buildings he’d assembled with his father, art projects from elementary school. He stretches out atop the quilt—red and green for Christmas, much like everything else in his mother’s house—and picks up a book. He reads a Christmas novel every year, though this year’s selection is some John Grisham drivel about a family skipping the holiday altogether. It passes the time, however, and he ends up so engrossed in the story that he misses the bedroom door opening until someone clears her throat.

He glances up, expecting to find Jane darkening his doorway. Instead, his mother smiles at him. “I hear you’re afraid of setting the chapel on fire,” she comments as she crosses the room.

He rolls his eyes. “Jane needs to learn to keep secrets if she hopes to be an Odinson,” he replies. His mother tips her head at him as he marks his page, and he rolls his lips together. “That was probably uncalled for.”

“I would agree,” she responds. She lowers herself onto the edge of his bed, her hands folded in her lap. They spend a few long minutes staring at one another, neither of them daring to break the silence. Well, relative silence; downstairs, Thor’s booming laugh echoes through the house, louder than a thunderclap. Loki nearly rolls his eyes. 

His mother, on the other hand, reaches out to touch his leg. “You should come,” she goads, and he glances at the book in his grip. “The early service is always short because of the children. Do you remember? We always used to sit in the loft during Christmas Eve services, but you—”

“Would insist on running down for the children’s carols, yes,” Loki finishes for her. He thinks he detects a hint of sadness in the way she sighs. “I’d rather leave the caroling to you, father, and Thor, this year.”

His mother is silent for a few seconds. “Just because Thor has a family now doesn’t make you less welcome.”

“Doesn’t it?” he replies. He raises his eyes in time to watch her purse her mouth into a tight line. He shakes his head. “I’m glad they’re happy together, Mother, but I know the looks I get: Thor with his beautiful fiancée and adorable daughter, and Loki, the other son, who changed his name to the one from the birth parents who abandoned him and only returns for holidays and funerals.” His mother frowns at him, her face creasing into a series of serious lines, and he holds up his hands. “I don’t usually mind,” he assures her, ignoring the bitterness that seeps into his own tone. “I just find it very tiring.”

“You aren’t doomed to spend your entire life alone, Loki.”

“Aren’t I?” His words sound sharp, even to his own ears. His mother’s sweeping thumb stills on his leg, and she raises an eyebrow. He shakes his head again, attempting to clear away all the loneliness that sneaks into his brain; in the end, though, he finds himself staring at his hands. “I will be fine without church,” he says quietly.

“I never suggested you wouldn’t,” his mother replies. She pats him on the leg, the bed shifting as she rises, and moves toward the door. He watches her back—she wears a blue shawl with silver thread embroidered into it over her usual church clothes—until she reaches the doorway and twists to face him. They stare at each other across the room for an almost interminably long time.

“Frigga!” his father bellows from downstairs. She rolls her eyes at his call, and Loki nearly smiles. “I will not be forced to sit in the front row again this year!”

She snorts a laugh and shakes her head. “Wish her a merry Christmas from our family,” she says warmly.

“And to whom am I wishing this?” Loki retorts, but his mother disappears down the hallway without another word.

Loki remains in his bedroom until he hears the car rumble down the driveway, its headlights an eerie flash of yellow in the pitch black of a rural December. It’s ten minutes before seven, frigid and silent, and he quickly changes out of his t-shirt and cardigan and into a thick, warm sweater. His snow boots wait for him near the back door, and he laces them up before layering on his scarf, hat, coat, and a pair of heavy gloves. The first gust of winter wind hits him like a wall of ice, cutting through his layers and nearly driving him back into the house; the second and third are much more tolerable, and by the time he’s halfway across the field, he hardly feels the cold at all. 

The farm is long but narrow, less than a mile from the western fence line to the east, and Loki trudges through the drifting snow until he is at the western-most boundary of their property. The fence there is probably older than he is, reinforced but never replaced. He shakes it to confirm that it will still support his weight, then brushes snow off the cross bar and hoists himself up. A barn owl cries and the snow blows across the barren fields, but otherwise, the night is silent.

She approaches more like a ghost than a human, a blotch of shadow against the snow, and Loki squints in the moonlight to insure she’s not a mirage. She wears tall brown boots meant more for riding than snow, and her red wool coat is unmistakable even in the dark. He considers waving, but instead, he tucks his hands between his thighs and waits.

“I can’t believe we still do this,” Sif Rowan chides once she’s close enough that her voice won’t be stolen by the wind, and Loki can’t help but grin at her. She’s wearing a headband over her ears, one that allows her long ponytail to fall freely down her back; it sways as she hoists herself onto the fence at his side. She digs into her bag—thick canvas, sturdier than the reusable sacks one finds at the grocery store—and pulls out a thermos and two Styrofoam cups. She fills them both before setting the thermos on the fence post, and Loki resists his urge to stick his nose into the Irish coffee. “My dad says you owe him for the whiskey.”

“He will undoubtedly replace it at my parents’ New Year’s Eve party,” Loki retorts.

She tips her head to the side. “You’re staying through the new year?”

“No, but my mother keeps reviewing the menu with me. I might as well be staying, I know the spread so well.” Sif laughs, then sips her coffee. “Heimdall arrived?” he asks after a few seconds. She snorts and rolls her eyes. “I ran into him at the courthouse a few days ago and he kept insisting he had cases he was afraid to miss.”

“Ezra always says that,” Sif complains, her fingers spreading around her cup. “He complains about coming, then attaches himself to his cell phone at all times in case a client _might_ have an unexpected crisis he can correct. I think he wishes he could be everywhere at once.” She pauses for a moment, her hair falling over her shoulder. “He may also just be continually horrified that our father is dating.”

“And you?”

“If there is a woman my father deigns worthy, I say good luck to her!” she replies. Her voice rings out across the field, and against his better judgment, Loki laughs. “My mother died eight years ago, and for the last six, I have encouraged him to find at least a friend.” She glances over at him. “But every time I encouraged him, he said, ‘I’ll find a companion after you, Sif.’”

He lifts his shoulders in a shrug as the coffee and whisky burns its path down his throat. “What changed this year?”

“According to him, everything,” she returns evenly. Their eyes meet and linger, and Loki feels something beside the coffee start to warm his belly. He opens his lips, ready to say something—ready to say _anything_ that might mend the distance between them—but Sif simply shakes her head. “Ezra loved my mother like his own,” she continues, almost as though silence never stretched between them. “I think he likes to believe she was our father’s one everlasting love.”

He swallows. “And what do you believe?”

“I no longer know,” she admits, and again sips her coffee.

They sit together for a long time, the wind sweeping up around them. The snow drifts, twirling in eddies that rise and glint in the moonlight before disappearing into the dark. Sif refills their cups, their arms brushing warmly together; they tap their cups together before drinking, and Loki thinks again and again that he sees something akin to sadness in her deep, dark eyes.

He helps himself to a hungry gulp of his coffee before he says, “About the Vandercamp case, Sif, I never—”

“Ezra asked me what I wanted for Christmas,” she interrupts, and his rushing words fade into a long release of breath. She stares at the surface of her coffee, loose strands of hair falling into her face; Loki desperately wants to brush them away and cup her cheek in his hand, but he knows the touch will be unwelcome. “I reminded him I was an adult, no longer the little sister he could dote on, and he said, ‘You’ve been sad for several months, and I’d like to change that.’” Her huffed breath is swept away by the wind. “But what I want for Christmas isn’t something he can give me.”

Loki draws in a breath. “Which is?”

Sif twists to glance up at him, her eyes soft and distant in the moonlight. “For us to be friends again,” she answers, and for a moment, Loki forgets how to exhale. “I worried for hours you wouldn’t come tonight, but here you are.”

He reaches out and touches his fingers to her leg. She stills, spooked like a doe under his touch, but she never flinches away. “I will always come,” he says, his voice hardly above a whisper. “No matter what happens between us, I will _always_ come.”

“I think I know that now,” she replies, and when she wraps her fingers around his, it’s to squeeze them, not push them away.

They sit together until their cups are empty and their bellies warm, idly alternating between stories of their families and companionable silence. He only releases her hand after she’s slipped off the fence and back onto her father’s property; he follows suit, landing on his own father’s side of the fence line and then, watching her cap up the thermos. “Happy Christmas,” he says once she’s slipped it and the cups back into her bag.

She smiles at him, her face somehow both too young and too old in the moonlight, and then leans forward to kiss him on the cheek. She smells of coffee and spice, and he grips the fence to keep from reaching out for her. “And to you,” she murmurs close to his ear, and then, slips away.

He watches her retreat into the darkness, her boots breaking through the fresh drifts of snow that cover the field. His fingers ache when her shadow finally disappears and he can release his grip on the wood. He dreams for a moment of racing after her, tearing through the fields and sweeping her into his arms—but he knows she’d never accept that from a man, least of all from him.

He shoves his hands into his pockets as he treks back across the field, the wind his only companion. He’s halfway to his parents’ house, already able to spot the glowing eyesores in the front yard, when he pauses to glance up at the sky. The moon is full, the stars out and glimmering, and he wonders for a moment at Jane’s “random cosmic accident,” and whether, far away in the blackness, there just might be something more waiting for him.

As he’d told his brother’s fiancée, he’s never seen much of a point in speaking to someone who isn’t there to listen.

But standing in his parents’ field, Sif’s kiss still warming his skin, Loki supposes there is no harm in trying.

**Author's Note:**

> In the MPU, Sif and Heimdall are half-siblings who share a father. More precisely, their father and Heimdall’s mother divorced, Heimdall moved in with his mother and had his name changed to her maiden name, and then their father married Sif’s mother. Heimdall moved back in with his father at some point after Sif was born, and they were raised primarily in the same house. I figure they are about six or seven years apart.
> 
> According to the internet, Heimdall went by the name Ezra on Earth at one time. I vastly preferred that to Donald, so thusly: Ezra.
> 
> I imagine the chapel that the Odinsons attend every Christmas to be a bit like the [Jenny Lind Chapel in Andover, Illinois](http://helios.augustana.edu/jlc/index.html). I sang there a couple times in undergrad and am very fond of it. It’s sort of earned its weird MPU cameo.


End file.
